Film Details

Few people know that director Lewis Milestone shot two versions of his WWI classic All Quiet on the Western Front: the celebrated sound version that won an early Academy Award for Best Picture, and a dialogue-free “silent” version made for the international market and for U.S. theaters not yet equipped for sound. (During the transition from silent pictures to talkies, Hollywood sometimes prepared two versions of new movies.) Tonight, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra (see 9/7) accompanies the lesser known version of Milestone’s masterpiece, which features the same cast as the sound version and to which it is almost identical (save for title cards). Mont Alto’s music will be supplemented by sound effects created live by Radio on the Lake Theatre. In either version, this screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s searing anti-war novel—in which German schoolboys’ heroic notions of war are dispelled by battlefield realities—is not to be missed. 35mm. 133 min.